Serene Outlook

It was a long-distance romance. She admired his cultivated European sensibility, his profound knowledge of beautiful things. She flew from her home in Seattle to his ancient castle outside Antwerp to meet him, bearing dreams of a residence overlooking Lake Washington. They spent the day together, and she told him what she wanted. He understood her, deeply. "Everything just jelled," she recalls.

Thus begins the tale of how a quintessentially American residence with overhanging eaves and rambling covered porches became the province of the legendary Belgian antiques dealer Axel Vervoordt. "He's very much a purist," the client explains of her choice of a designer an ocean and a continent away, his visits to Seattle supplemented by e-mail and FedEx. "I loved the strength and simplicity of his pieces. I wanted something classic and enduring. I didn't want anything trendy and fashionable."

The residence sits alongside a lane high on a hill in one of the city's choicest neighborhoods, with commanding views of Lake Washington, Mount Rainier and, yes, the Gateses. She is English; her husband, South African; their three children, Seattleites. The couple were drawn to the Shingle Style residence designed by Seattle architect Gregory J. Bader, an alumnus of Robert A. M. Stern's office, as it was nearing completion. "We found ourselves in the unusual position of remodeling a brand-new house," she says.

"The house is conducive to tranquillity, to sitting on the window seat reading and looking out and just relaxing."

While it possesses a modern sense of interior space, the sprawling residence draws on historic pedigrees. The château-esque slate roof, the broad outdoor stone staircases leading to a central porch with sweeping views, the generous balconies, combine the feeling of Newport "cottages" built for grandees with earthy Northwest Coast materials like wood and stone. Picturesque stair towers on either side of the house, encircled by windows, recall the chart rooms on square-riggers that once plied the waters of Lake Washington. "In Seattle," notes Bader, "water is inescapable."

For the couple, the chief lure of the house was the expansive views, accessible from every major room. "The house is very conducive to tranquillity," says the wife, "to sitting on the window seat reading and looking out and just relaxing.

I have a very English sensibility. I wanted the kids to feel they could jump on the sofas and that the dog could fall asleep on the chairs. Ornate gilding wouldn't have worked. I didn't want anything uptight and serious."

Though he lives in a nearly 1,000-year-old castle—Kasteel van's-Gravenwezel—overlooking a moat, Axel Vervoordt understood and appreciated her thinking. One of the world's foremost antiques experts, he personally supervises between 12 and 20 major design commissions a year. In his interiors, nothing looks new except the way furniture, paintings and objects are displayed in space. His rooms, dense with antiques of the highest quality, always have a touch of Zen, which he continues to study. Eclectic in his tastes, he is equally admiring of the old painted doors of the Forbidden City and a Mark Rothko painting.

"They have great class," Vervoordt says of the couple, with whom he rendezvoused in Europe, New York and Seattle. "The wife did a lot herself. There is the relaxed feeling of a house close to the water, not ostentatious at all. It's a house with great personality and a sense of stylish living without showing off."

The residence harks back to the "Golden Age" of progress after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889 and the Alaska Gold Rush in 1898 and beyond. It was during that era that the late-Victorian Queen Anne and stick-style houses for which the city is known came to dominate its most distinguished neighborhoods.

Then, as now, the finest examples of Pacific Northwest vernacular embraced the spectacular natural landscape. The French doors of the couple's residence open onto the terrace facing the lawn, "creating a kind of protecting belvedere," in the architect's words. On the upper floor, doors lead to a balcony with views of the snowcapped Cascades. It recalls the widow's walk, where, so the legend goes, sea captains' wives would watch for their husbands.

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Inside, the great room is arranged to take advantage of the panoramic views, with a pentagonal banquette beneath the bay window. "It is a very warm, lived-in atmosphere with a beautiful round English table in the corner," says Vervoordt. "The bay window is for enjoying the view during the day. At night you can be cozy and warm around the fire. The antiques all have their original patinas, with no gilding. Nothing looks new."

The kitchen is an informal gathering place where the family members often find themselves ensconced in the 18th-century English Windsor and ladderback chairs, struggling with homework around the French oak table.

The dining room, in contrast, is an elegant space with an Italian landscape by the late-Mannerist painter Joos de Momper (1564–1635), procured from a Dutch collection. The hills depicted in the painting, notes Vervoordt, "almost mirror" the scene outside, through windows framed by draperies handwoven in Belgium. A 19th-century Dutch chandelier hangs from the coffered ceiling above the table.

As one might expect, the eye is constantly drawn to Vervoordtian nuances born of a gifted eye: a set of Georgian library steps in a corner of the great room from Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, for instance, or a rare French settee in the two-story entrance gallery. The wife finds herself attracted to the Chinese antiques, especially the Tang Dynasty horses, and the series of architectural models of French staircases unobtrusively placed in the great room.

The house gives the strong impression "of timelessness, as though it has been there forever," which was the designer's goal.

Perhaps only in the age of e-mail could distance create such intimacy.

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